I was intrigued with the headline “Pluto mission New Horizons may save us on Earth”. I was worried that somehow Pluto was going to be related to climate change, but was relieved that the claim was only that knowing more about comets would have saved the dinosaurs.

A bit of a stretch, I thought.

Two sentences in particular caught my eye:

“But first, scientists need to know if it survived the chaotic Kuiper Belt, the region beyond Neptune which Stern has described as a “shooting gallery” of cosmic debris.

NASA expects to receive a signal from the spacecraft later on Tuesday to find out whether or not the spacecraft made it through intact.”

The Kuiper belt is a vast donut shaped area filled with rocks, lumps of ice and other spacecraft hazards.

The entire belt extends from 30 to about 55 AU from the Sun.

An AU or Astronomical Unit is a measure of distance used by astronomers when dealing with Solar System sized distances. It’s the distance from the Sun to the Earth and about 93 million miles or 149.6 million kilometres.

The main part of the belt starts at about 40 AU from the Sun and extends to about 48 AU. That will be the most hazardous part of the journey for New Horizons.

At it’s present speed of about 50,000 kilometres per hour, it’ll take 2.4 years for it to reach the start of the main belt, 5.2 years to reach the end of the main belt and 7.6 years to reach the outer edge of the entire Kuiper belt.